As our ‘Early Modern Scholar-Printers Online’ digital humanities project approaches the end of our current round of funding, we are pleased to report on the progress we have made and the goals we have achieved. During the past spring semester and start of the summer, we have had a team of undergraduate student-assistants (five in total, who come from backgrounds in Classics, History and Comparative Literature) that have dedicated time to transcribing various texts at the Bancroft library. The texts that this team of student-assistants has been examining and transcribing document important developments in the world of the print-scholar with their display of innovative techniques of early modern information management and presentation through the use of printed visuals, paratextual apparata, and multi-colored inking. These titles, moreover, represent an array of printing centers from Spain to France to England.
By delving deeper into this collection of printed texts, we were able to more greatly appreciate the concerns, priorities and choices of the printer-scholars as the information managers of the early modern world. As we took various opportunities to step-back and reflect on work and progress, we all (project co-leaders and student-assistants alike) found it fruitful to reflect on ways in which our DH project was bringing to the surface a conversation between old and new media, how the old-but-then new technology of the printing press sparked considerations analogous (though by no means equivalent) to current debates surrounding the place of computational tools in presenting and disseminating humanistic knowledge, and how the possibilities (and limitations) of the printing press open a window onto those of digital technologies. Our lens onto such questions was further enhanced by the computational training our DH team has taken advantage of through the support of our DH Fellowship, which includes the following: R Programming, Geospatial Data in R, Web Maps with Leaflet, HTML & CSS, and Adobe InDesign.